It is, of course, reassuring that readers of The Telegraph are overwhelmingly not in favour of new born baby killing, but we should not fall into the trap of believing that this ludicrous and repugnant idea ends today, once it has been trashed by the British public.
Neither should we be so naive as to think that this is just a case of medical philosophers disappearing so far up their own behinds that they believe that only persons who can disappear up their own behinds are human. This isn't a joke or a 'let's really think outside the box' moment. Other Catholic commentators, like Will Heaven and Caroline Farrow, have discerned rightly that this kind of paper is a boon to the pro-life movement because it demonstrates how very fragile is the house of cards built by a medical profession that professes to be at ease with abortion. The paper writers say, if we're saying yes to abortion, then why not yes to this? It's a cold, brutal, logical conclusion which steers well away from any sense of human sympathy or well, humanity. It also sheds more light on abortion in general, an issue that simply refuses to lay down, die and reside in a surgical waste bin.
However, with all that said, the inclusion in such a prestigious and well-respected journal of this article is, in my opinion, a 'feeler' article, testing the public mood. You see, with all great, mind-blowing breaches of natural law which end up becoming tolerated and then normalised in any society, it always starts exactly like this. If you had told a tweed wearing English gent in the 1940s and 1950s, that in approximately about 60 years later, the Government would be considering 'gay marriage', he would simply say, "Ah, I love a gay marriage. O, how happy and gay was the marriage I attended last week, of my niece to her fiance. He's a banker you know!' If you told him that what you meant was that men would be marrying men, he would choke on his pipe.
If you told a woman in the 1940s and 1950s that in the year 2011, a man and a woman would be able to go to the National Health Service and be referred to a clinic where the woman could have her unborn child 'terminated' for more or less any reason, including 'social reasons', or on the grounds of gender, disability or genetic disorder of one kind or another, the woman would say something like, "Terminated? Babies? Are you sure you're not talking about the 6:15 to Littlehampton?" If you told the same woman that the same society in 2011 would allow and enshrine in the law of the land the creation of IVF babies which involve babies being made outside of the mother's womb, in laboratories, she would look at you quizzically and think you quite mad. If you told her countless embryoes were destroyed in the process she'd think you nutty. If you told her that unborn children would basically be farmed on an industrial scale she'd wonder, in 1945, why we bothered fighting Hitler.
Sadly, while its comforting to think that British society would today most likely throw its arms up in the air about a future of legalised infanticide, all it takes to change the mind of society is a drip-drip approach to broaching the issue and having it discussed, having 'respected' people discuss it, keeping the issue afloat, using the mass media to normalise the discussion and within 50 years, you've changed the culture enough for the culture to accept it. It took a long for the eugenics movement of the 1920s that spawned the monster of abortion to culimate the Abortion Act (1967), but in the end, through powerful propaganda, it achieved its aims. Now, the same movement is attempting the next phase of the program. You think it is ridiculous, and it sounds ridiculous, but this is how it always begins. I'd be pleasantly surprised if Professor Dawkins publicly condemned this paper. For the time being, the paper puts pro-abortionists on the backfoot and forces them to justify their position, but at the same time, cold logic lends itself to the conclusion reached by the 'ethicists' at the BMJ and, sadly, cold, reductivist logic is, in an increasingly secularised Britain, the order of the day.
You see, while abortion was sold to the general public as a 'woman's choice' about what she does with 'her body', abortion was essentially one flank aimed at breaking down the long-held public morality on sex and reproduction, along with its wicked twin sister, artificial contraception. I sincerely doubt, however that the long-term aim of an abortive society was to give women choice or to empower women. I sincerely suspect that the long-term aim of the creation of an abortive society was to enable the future society - the utopia imagined by the misanthropic, sociopathic and frankly psychopathic eugenicists of those days, many of whom are still alive today - to take assertive action on weeding out from human society the kind of people eugenicists like Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger thought should be 'pruned from the vine' of society. In other words, the poor, feckless (people like me really), the mentally ill, the disabled, the lame, the deaf, the dumb, the blacks, and, unattractive, yes, even the homosexuals, and anyone who is genetically 'unfit' for human society, could be blocked from entry into the 'utopian' world which, with the help of mad crackpot scientists, is in the meantime searching for the elixir of life and eternal youth.
All that may sound completely insane and preposterously evil, but you have to understand the mindset of those who support the eugenics movement in the United Kingdom, be it tacitly or actively and also appreciate that many of them work in genetics and medicine, as well as areas like psychiatry, social services and 'reproductive health'. A part of me thinks that this latest BMJ paper is strange because one would think that women who wanted to know it they're baby was going to be born 'imperfect' would dispatch the order to 'seek and destroy' the unborn 'unfit' baby prior to birth. That's the real reason, of course, that we have pre-natal scans. Perhaps, this academic suggestion made in the Journal of Medical Ethics, really, is just to find a way to ensure that those who don't want scans but who then realise their baby has been born with Down's Syndrome have a legal loophole to fall back on to avoid the unwanted Downs baby, in the heartless hope that the 10% of Down's Syndrome babies who are not aborted before birth, will be aborted after birth in 40 years time, once it has become so rare and socially unacceptable to give birth to a Downs Syndrome child, or child with any disability, in that dystopian vision of Britain. The aim of the eugenicists, many of whom are geneticists, is to rid the world of downs syndrome. While that entails ridding the World of babies who suffer from Downs, that's just the price that the babies have to pay in order to help us to rid the world of the disease. That's the logic. These people imagine a bright vision of Britain which is, in the words of the British Eugenics Society member, William Beveridge, free of the 'Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. How do you achieve that? You ensure that the 'kind of people' who fall into these categories are never born in the first place (or are not allowed to live).
Yet, and yet, it was the vision of society that was held by eugenicists of the 1920s and 30s. It was the vision of society held by Hitler and the Nazis. It is the vision of a sizable number working in medicine, genetics and other fields today. An interesting footnote to the vision is that Stonewall should be wary to lend too much support to this vision of a society in which IVF, abortion and, perhaps in future, 'post-birth abortion' becomes the certified norm for those with genetic defects. I say this because there are still those working in the field of genetics and medicine who believe that homosexuality is a genetic defect, regardless of the availability of concrete research that backs up that belief. In future, because, let's face it, not everyone is going to be happy after a pre-natal scan has revealed the homosexual gene, it could be homosexuals that are targeted as part of the future 'homocide' of the human race, because, from what I read of Marie Stopes, she didn't have much time for the gays either.
The irony is that people will read the articles and the news story of this academic paper and think that this is impossible in Britain. Well, if it is possible for a 'civilised' country like China to have its State police force infanticide on families in the name of population control, then why is it impossible for it to take place in Europe? Don't be too surprised if this idea one day takes off in the UK, because its already going on elsewhere. The other great irony is that the architects of this revolution in human understanding of who is an 'actual human' and who is not, believe that eugenics is inherently about human progress. Those people forget that us Brits were happily killing our unwanted, defected two year olds, or sacrificing them to appease 'angry god's' until those irritating Catholics came along to tell us not to do that kind of thing and to honour the supreme Sacrifice of Christ at Calvary, made present at every Mass.
So, its nice that the overwhelming majority of people will be aghast at this latest 'academic paper', but don't be too surprised if in 40 years time, its a regular feature of British life. The only defense against the massacre of the innocent unborn, and, indeed born, is the Christian Faith. Christianity built the civilisation in which we are fortunate enough to live. As the pillars of Christianity are removed from the public sphere, don't be surprised when the roof of the civilisation collapses as in an earthquake, and like in an earthquake, we will be calling it a miracle when a newborn is pulled out from the rubble...alive.
